When I finished this short book (more of a novella really) my first thought was ‘what the heck was that/!’ It’s a very strange book.
In some ways it felt very nostalgic – I grew up in the north of England in the 1970s and the style of the book felt like that sort of thing they made us read in school – like Stig of the Dump, or The Railway Children. I’ve lived in Belfast now for 35 years, but the northern English dialect words and phrases really took me back and sparked old memories.
It reads like a lucid dream or demented ramblings about childhood fears and hopes and magic and myth. Apparently there are lots of nods to things from Alan Garners previous novels, which I haven’t read, so they were lost on me, but I am familiar with a lot of the English mythology from other books.
It feels like it’s probably a very deep book, and quite possibly a lot of it went over my head, some of the reviews I looked at after finishing reading implied all kinds of cleverness.
I’m kind of tempted to read some of Alan Garner’s old books now.
Sarah Wray Writer 